Software maker Samsara, co-founded by Indian-American, rises in trading debut after IPO raises $805 million

December 15, 2021

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Sanjit Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Samsara, also co-founded Meraki, one of the most successful networking companies of the past decade, which was sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion. He has been recognized as a TR35 honoree by MIT Technology Review, a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. He holds a B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford and an S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Photo: Samsara.com

Samsara Inc., adding to a record year for software listings, climbed in its trading debut after raising $805 million in an initial public offering at the top of a marketed range. The company was co-founded by Sanjit Biswas.

Shares of the Samsara, which sold for $23 in the IPO, opened trading in New York Wednesday at $24.90. They were up 8.7% to $25 at 12:34 p.m., giving the company a market value of about $12.5 billion.

Samsara was aiming for its valuation in an IPO to exceed its $5.4 billion value in a $400 million funding round in 2020, Bloomberg News reported in February. Accounting for employee stock options, the company has a fully diluted value closer to $13 billion at the current price.

The listing adds to the all-time high of more than $37 billion raised by 80 software companies this year on U.S. exchanges, surpassing the previous record of $20 billion in 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Two of this year’s newly public companies, Playtika Holding Corp. and AppLovin Corp., raised $2 billion or more in their listings.

Samsara’s software and hardware are designed to help businesses run physical operations such as fleet management more efficiently. The company had a net loss of $102 million on revenue of $303 million for the nine months ended Oct. 30, compared with a loss and revenue of $174 million a year earlier, according to its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Co-founders Biswas, who is chief executive officer, and John Bicket, the chief technology officer, control more than 24% of the shareholder voting power after the IPO, the filings show.

The company’s largest investor, affiliates of Andreessen Horowitz, has 17.5% of the voting power, while General Catalyst controls 9.7%. Its board of directors include Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the venture capital firm, who also sits on the board of Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms Inc.

The offering is being led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Allen & Co. The company’s shares are trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol of IOT.